Wad knew well how rare it was for a mage to make such sacrifice. The usual thing, when a mage had been possessed, was for the mage to yield, to surrender quickly to the Sutahite’s will, and then become its partner, obeying it but receiving the rewards of power ruthlessly applied.

Danny North could have taken that road. Set would have used Danny’s gates to become the most powerful mage in history, forcing all the other mages to bend to his will. Truly he would have been the Great Dragon then, master of two worlds, manipulator of humankind, mage and drowther alike. Mage of mages. God of gods, at least in the eyes of drowthers.

Women, money, mastery of everyone. Anyone that Danny hated, he could have punished; Set would have had no scruples about the taking of a life, of many lives.

But Danny had thrust all of that away, removed it from himself with no hope of getting any power back, so that Set would not have the use of that power. So that Westil was still safe. So that Wad’s work was not undone.

Danny North, I admire you for your courage. I honor you for your cleverness. I pity you for your loss.

Because even if Set moves on to someone else, even if he doesn’t kill you in revenge for having tricked him, do not think for a moment that I will ever give these gates back to you. I do not even want to be as noble as you. For a while you were a greater mage than me. I am now, again, the greatest Gatefather in the world, and you are nothing. I will never give that up. I am the Gate Thief, and because of your nobility, the victory is mine.

AFTERWORD

For those who wish for an afterword that is a continuation of the themes of the book, I must disappoint you. Instead, I want to talk a little about the practical difficulties that only the writers of fictional stories have any reason to care about.

This book was six months late, but for good reason. If I were still the young writer of Songmaster and Treason, or even the not-so-young writer of Saints and Ender’s Game, I would have delivered the book on time. It would also have been a very different kind of fiction.

In the years since then I’ve learned something about the structure of storytelling. I realized, just as I began writing the book in time to meet the original deadline, that I had the structure all wrong. I was going to use this book to tell the story of the wars of the Mithermages who had received the enhancement of their powers—thus melding the world of meddling gods shown in the Iliad and Odyssey with our modern kind of warfare.